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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27844114">Fade Into You</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarkAstarte/pseuds/StarkAstarte'>StarkAstarte</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Cobra Kai (Web Series), Karate Kid (Movies)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>1990s, 1994 Los Angeles, 90s AU, Drummer Johnny Lawrence, Eventual Smut, Inspired by Music, M/M, Music AU, Redemption, Slow Burn, Ten Years Later, lawrusso</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 21:26:43</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>16,443</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27844114</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarkAstarte/pseuds/StarkAstarte</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Daniel is restless. He wanders the city looking for something. He finds it in one of the places he left it. The Cobra Kai Dojo isn't what it used to be. Neither is Johnny Lawrence. </p><p>This is the 90s Musician Johnny Lawrence/Lonely Daniel LaRusso fic I for one have been dreaming of. Won't you join me?</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Bobby Brown &amp; Johnny Lawrence, Carmen Diaz &amp; Johnny Lawrence, Daniel LaRusso &amp; Laura Lawrence, Daniel LaRusso &amp; Mr. Miyagi, Daniel LaRusso/Johnny Lawrence, Johnny Lawrence &amp; Laura Lawrence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>52</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>95</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/OwnThyself/gifts">OwnThyself</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Fic title taken from the 1993 song by Mazzy Star, whose fuzzy psychedelic California dream-pop inspires the mood of this fic.</p>
    </blockquote><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>The last time he drove through here on his way to make a delivery, the old dojo was still vacant. It’d been empty for years, windows dark like something eyeless. Same mural with the giant snake and stylized graffiti lettering faded into a kind of toothless malevolence. It scrapes at him in old tender places, but it can’t sink a fang in.</p><p>Tonight, the lights are on.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Los Angeles keeps on snubbing him and Daniel keeps taking it, like a schmuck, but what can he do? Daniel is still a stranger here. The city spread out around him is and always has been gossamer, make-believe, a fairy tale it writes about itself. Maybe Daniel just isn’t ethereal enough. He feels like a stone falling through water whenever he tries to slip between the lights and into the pink haze that envelopes L.A like poisoned cotton candy. He still sticks out like a sore thumb, even when you consider that most of the city’s populace isn’t blond, isn’t white. Is as dark haired and velvet-eyed and as dark-skinned or darker than Daniel. It’s been comforting how often he’s been mistaken for Hispanic. It makes him feel like he belongs to people who fit here. No one really knows what or who he is for certain. He doesn’t know those things himself. His roots cling precariously to bedrock not his own. He’s tenacious, sure—but tenuous, too. Temporary with nowhere else to grow</p><p>He doesn’t miss Jersey. He could’ve gone back with his ma when she finally admitted the California dream didn’t have her name on it after all, not even in half burnt-out lights. He misses her, but he really never liked winter, despite his protestations to the contrary so many years back. He’s made for heat. Maybe of a different kind, but any kind of heat is better than bone-gnawing February in Newark that seems to last longer than the rest of the winter months combined. LA is dirty, sure. But it’s a filth that sparkles. It’s a clean kind of corruption, like bones long picked dry. Or old toys abandoned on the side of the Pacific Coast Highway for the sun to slowly degrade over time. Newark is no cleaner, and it’s a hell of a lot darker, even in summer.</p><p>In Southern California, winter is like a slightly longer held breath and then a warm exhale, benevolent and mischievous, an annual playfight that never varies its moves and telegraphs itself wildly before pulling back from the gentlest tap. Daniel never has the chance to get truly cold, cold down to his marrow, even out in the desert. Not that he ever goes to the desert. But he thinks about it. He thinks about how he might like to see the stars sometime. Real ones. Not just the ones memorializing human gods living and dead, pressed into concrete. Stars he can gaze up at without being able to reach out and touch, rather than ones he can walk right over, completely oblivious, the names scraping the soles of his shoes without leaving any kind of trace on him.</p><p>He doesn’t know what brings him to North Hollywood tonight. It’s not exactly his stomping ground. Not that the places he knows best are really too expansive. He spends most of his life, as he has done since high school, at Mr. Miyagi’s little jade green house tucked away across the tracks in Reseda. He pretty much spends the rest of it at Mr. Miyagi’s Little Trees, which after a couple of iffy years has started to really flourish. Daniel realizes he doesn’t really have any places all his own. He’s been living his life with and through and beside his beloved old sensei for so long that he doesn’t know who he is outside of that. Some nights he gets restless. He drives around in the banana yellow De Luxe until dawn, hunting for something he never really finds.</p><p>Tonight, he decides to park. Get out. Walk. Push through the spill of lights with the sharp edge of his shadow and try to make room for himself. He melts into the golden throng of sleek Californian bodies that swallow him up like a scanty glass of water. Daniel hasn’t grown much since high school. He sometimes still wears the same shoes he did in senior year when he was getting his ass handed to him on the regular. He should really just throw them out, but he keeps thinking <em>They have one more season in them. One more good set of months before </em>kaput. His ma never liked him to throw anything away that had any life left in it. Daniel is still her son from nearly 3000 miles away. He feels like she can see him all the way from Newark. He likes the feeling and doesn’t. He doesn’t want her to see how he’s only half-living here while insisting it’s where he wants to be. It got harder to justify after the earthquake hit Reseda back in January. Lucille LaRusso had begged her boy to come home. But he’d clung to California, shaken but still stubborn. A suckering vine still dreaming of flowering one day.</p><p>Daniel hasn’t been on Lankershim Boulevard for months. It’s a name that means nothing to him, for a place that’s so significant to his life. The last time he drove through here on his way to make a delivery, the old dojo was still vacant. It’d been empty for years, windows dark like something eyeless. Same mural with the giant snake and stylized graffiti lettering faded into a kind of toothless malevolence. It scrapes at him in old tender places, but it can’t sink a fang in. Not deep, anyway.</p><p>Tonight, the lights are on. A surreal prismatic seepage crawls over the pavement. At first Daniel thinks he’s seeing things. It wouldn’t be the first time. The light spills through the grubby frosted windows painted with the stylized silhouettes of fighters. Colours faze in and out, moving over the sidewalk like the reflection of pool water. Blue and green. Purple and yellow. The sparkle of smashed glass gleams like spilled diamonds in the gutter. It’s mesmerizing. Before Daniel can ask himself what the hell he thinks he’s doing, he’s moving through that light and toward the door he hasn’t pushed open in ten years. He doesn’t realize until he opens the door and the drone spills out with the light that he can hear music. It hits him like a wall of sound. He can feel it from the roots of his teeth all the way to his pelvis. His toes curl in his shoes and his hair stands on end. He holds his breath because he can’t help it. The sound pulls him in like arms around him he isn’t expecting, isn’t sure whose they are, but decides to go with it.</p><p>The old dojo is the same even though it isn’t. Like someone wearing a new style of clothes but you know they are the same old asshole you want nothing to do with. All the posters and framed photos are gone. The red perimeter is presumably still there. Someone has painted the walls and ceiling a sloppily-applied black that makes the space feel both claustrophobic and infinite, like a laser show when you aren’t high but will be soon. The floor beneath Daniel’s feet is sticky with God knows what, but that’s nothing too new for a dojo that hasn’t been properly cleaned in a long time. The mats are still springy, dragged out of alignment. It helps to deaden the sound. It cushions the people who are bouncing up and down counter-rhythmically, even though it doesn’t quite seem like the right kind of music for pogoing and pushing each other into a frenzy like he’s seen on MTV in the windows of electronics stores. Mr. Miyagi still doesn’t own a TV. Hell, he still doesn’t see the need for electricity. Sometimes the lights of the city are shocking to Daniel’s system when he hasn’t been away from the little paper-windowed house in Reseda for awhile.</p><p>The melodic drone of the singer’s voice is like an umbilical cord connected to something Daniel can’t place, but it tugs on him. He presses through the moving bodies, compelled by the way she moves like water. She is looking up through the thick strands of her long curly hair at the undulating lights rather than at the people watching her. They all sway along in sympathetic counterrhythm to her sensual sashay. It’s her eyes that arrest Daniel. It’s like looking in the mirror. She’s a beautiful girl, so there’s no contest. Her face is the shape of a compressed heart and her upturned breasts wobble enticingly as she shifts her weight from one hip to the other. Daniel is just a coltish boy turned into a lanky man, no less awkward than he was at 17, but her skin is warm and deep like his. Her plush lips chewed almost to the blood. Her hair that same dark shining brown that trips everyone up about him, like they’ve never seen a third generation Sicilian before. She’s not Italian. She really is Hispanic, he’s pretty sure. He appreciates her without desire. It’s all animal recognition, like to like, even though he’s never held a microphone in his life and isn’t likely to for any reason like this one. She's taller than he is, too. But then, who isn't. </p><p>The flash and flip of the drummer through the haze of the smoke machine catches his peripheral, but Daniel doesn’t really look any closer until the song comes to a nearly imperceptible end, the singer mumbling something unintelligibly into the mic, dark eyes gleaming, lashes dropped. But then she leans to speak to the blur of blond hair and compact muscle behind the drum set crammed against the back edge of the tiny makeshift stage. The guy turns towards her with a flash of smiling teeth and gleaming eyes, and Daniel sees <em>blue</em>. He sees that colour like some people see red, and rage has only ever been the half of it. He is confronted by eyes the shade of the most dangerous depth of ocean. To the untrained eye it looks calm, that blue. Pacific. But even at his most still, Johnny Lawrence has never been calm. Or safe. Or in any way tame. Daniel freezes, a too small threatened animal again. His eyes feel like they take up so much space on his face the rest of him disappears. He knows the feeling of this expression even if he doesn’t, thank God, know how stupid it looks. He sends up another thanks that those eyes don’t land on him.</p><p>For a second or three, Daniel allows himself the merciful delusion that it’s not what it looks like. That mop of moonlight-coloured hair and miles of glistening muscle is a common enough combination in Los Angeles. Eyes that colour are as familiar as graffiti on pastel-painted brickwork. But he’s fooling himself. No one looks like that but one person. No one does this to Daniel LaRusso but Johnny Lawrence. King Karate of the Valley. Pushing up on ten years changes nothing. The way Daniel’s insides twist and liquefy, it’s like that night on the beach in Topanga all over again. Only Johnny doesn’t need to lay a finger on him to gut-punch Daniel like he’s fifteen and weightless again. Who punched who first back then doesn’t matter. All that matters is that Johnny is incandescent under pink light <em>now </em>and Daniel can’t move. He can’t breathe. A man who can’t breathe can’t fight, and he doesn’t. He’s paralyzed, praying not to be seen. Some part of him wants just that, to be scrutinized again. He’s remained unseen in certain indescribable ways all these years. Has he been waiting all this time for a moment like this? Is that why he stayed in California when he doesn’t and never will belong here? Daniel doesn’t know. He doesn’t think he wants to know.</p><p>After a lull in which there was never a moment of quiet between the dull roar of the chattering crowd and the spasmic feedback of the monitors and mics, the next song begins. Daniel watches Johnny move. If he reads a restrained fury in the seemingly relaxed control the impossible blond has over his body, Daniel can’t be blamed. He has past experience with all that controlled power no one else on earth will ever have. Johnny Lawrence’s body is still a coiled warning. As usual, Daniel doesn’t heed it. He could slip away before he’s noticed but stays where he is. He has never known when to leave well enough alone.</p><p>The concept of Johnny as a drummer blows Daniel’s mind and is oddly fitting at the same time. He always knew Johnny loved music. It was kind of obvious, the way he was never parted from his Walkman unless he was dressed in his gi or burning around on his motorbike. Daniel used to wonder what he was listening to all the time, but he could never quite hazard a guess. He loved to pretend Johnny was bopping along to The Bangles, crying alone to Eternal Flame. Which wasn’t as humorous a thought as he’d intended after he'd actually seen Johnny cry. That image is burned forever on the backs of Daniel's eyelids and it haunts him even now, with the terrifying blond in front of him again. He’s not sure he’s ever seen that much emotion on the face of anyone not actively at a graveside. It isn’t there now. Johnny’s face is awash in another expression, one that Daniel has never in his wildest dreams associated with his high school rival.</p><p>Bliss.</p><p>There is no other word for it.</p><p>Johnny closes his eyes when he drums, and he looks utterly transported. Unbothered by the world around him. Certainly uninterested in the attention being paid to him by 200 sweaty social rejects with pierced faces and thrift store couture flapping as they alternadance out of time to the impossible-to-anticipate hazy half-tones of the beautiful dark-eyed girl’s vocals. But Johnny keeps the heartbeat going, strong and relentless. Daniel can feel it changing his pulse. Forcing it to move in time. It hurts in an old way Daniel missed. It hurts like a fist to his heart. People move around him, shove into him and call it dancing. He stands still. He stands alone, staring at a boy. He feels like he has always been staring at this boy, even when he couldn’t. Even when he hadn’t seen Johnny in years, Daniel was just standing around somewhere waiting.</p><p>Clearly Johnny has never forgotten how to move. What his body is for. He is the most physical person Daniel has ever seen, and he’s bigger now. Stronger. Taller. Just. <em>More. </em>While Daniel stands there with his mouth open wearing his tenth grade jeans and his dead father’s too-big shirt. He remembers that first moment in this dojo. He was fifteen. He slipped in to watch what strong boys do. All of them in perfect sync but not the same. There was one taller than the rest. Better made. Hell, more <em>beautiful,</em> with his dangerous grace and perfect face. That feathered swoop of hair. Tensile neck elongating as Johnny raised his head to watch Daniel daring to infiltrate his space. Plush lips smirking in a way that was so confusingly fond. The expression of someone excited to see someone else in the place where they are most powerful, most themselves. Most able to make good on macho <em>Look What I Can Do </em>posturing. As if he had been waiting for Daniel. Hoping. Maybe even knowing he’d turn up eventually, like there’d never been a doubt or a choice. Daniel had turned away then but he keeps watching now.</p><p>The memory is so strong Daniel doesn’t realize at first that Johnny has spotted him. Is looking at him just that way now while his arms continue to flex and fly. He tosses his hair out of his eyes in that old way and Daniel is lost in a smile so affectionate and somehow slightly pained and self-conscious this time, for just the splittest of seconds before it’s gone. Daniel wants it back. That smile has always been his and he just about missed it. He won’t look away. It might come back and he needs to be ready. </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>LaRusso and his goddamn bedroom eyes will be the death of him.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Johnny doesn’t realize LaRusso is actually standing there in front of him until <em>after </em>he smiles at him like an idiot.</p><p>He’s imagined him there so often and for so long, he’s kind of gotten used to grinning like an asshole at nothing but a phantom of a boy. He used to worry that Daniel really was a ghost, this past year more than any other. So much has been happening. The world feels sharp. Dangerous. Even in California, or maybe especially here. LA is seething with threat. Disasters natural and human keep colliding in ways no amount of technicolor sunshine or hyperreal sandy stretches of beach can do much about. The earthquake at the beginning of the year was like some kind of harbinger.</p><p>The only thing Johnny really holds onto about the Northridge earthquake is that he’d immediately and ever since been terrified for Daniel LaRusso. Which is stupid, because even though the epicentre had been in Reseda, for all he knew the kid didn’t even live there anymore. He could’ve gone back to the East Coast, and Johnny wouldn’t exactly have heard about it from anyone. LaRusso hadn’t ever made a single friend their own age that Johnny knows of, so there was no one to ask.</p><p>Not that Johnny would have. LaRusso sure isn’t any friend of his. Not that Johnny has all that many, either. But he’s been scared, bone-deep nauseated at the thought that his old enemy had been buried in a pile of concrete and rebar, or smothered to death in the smog that clung to the city even worse than usual that week. LaRusso has always been too stupid to get the hell out of harm’s way. In the months after the buildings came down and the overpasses twisted like screwed up spines, Johnny had the worst nightmares of his life. He spent his nights digging through rubble for hours, his fingernails ripped out at the root and oozing blood. Johnny dreamed he’d called the name he never dares speak aloud. Except that he woke with it on his lips again, night after night. Just like in high school. When the damage hadn’t been any force of nature other than Johnny himself.</p><p>So seeing LaRusso in the crowd in this old dojo of all places? Yeah, Johnny fucking smiles at him. Sue him, okay? He’s relieved. But then he feels like an asshole. Because Daniel goddamn LaRusso is actually staring back at him. He’s not dead, and Johnny’s glad, but he’s also starting to wish he himself could drop dead on the spot, but he can’t miss a beat. Not because Carmen will give a shit one way or another, she’s totally in her own little drone-zone. But because Johnny gives a shit, a colossal one. He cares in general about precision and resonance. But for some reason it matters that much more right now with a pair of doe eyes even dreamier than he remembers glued to his face. They melt over him like chocolate forgotten on a summer dashboard.</p><p>He doesn’t fumble his sticks, no way. Not ever. But Johnny feels his energy shift from something intense but mellow and relaxed to an old familiar coiled tension at the edges. It’s kind of hard to drum and maintain eye-contact, especially with the lights that occasionally blind him when they strobe just right, but Johnny melds his gaze with LaRusso’s. Like he can keep Daniel there with a look, his blue eyes a paralyzing force like back in the terrible old days.</p><p>LaRusso and his goddamn bedroom eyes will be the death of him.</p><p>Those heavy-lidded velvety baby browns that never ever made a single actual appearance in Johnny’s bedroom where eyes like that, those eyes in particular, <em>belong</em>. Only in fantasy, never reality. Not even after Johnny’d realized that’s what he wanted, all that long last half of senior year. But they’d never really connected after they’d had to stop doing it with violent contact illegal or otherwise. Maybe they just hadn’t known how to begin, either of them. Suddenly shy like they hadn’t been as intimate as pretty much anything. Even that one thing. Johnny’s not sure it could be closer, deeper. More meaningful. Not with anyone he’s ever been with, anyway.  He doesn’t even bother chasing the physicality of Daniel LaRusso in other people—he’d never find him. There is only one exact make and model, a special edition. A one of a kind, like that banana yellow clunker LaRusso used to drive.</p><p>Johnny chases down the end of the song with a little more fervent energy than the band had ever intended. Carmen comes down enough from her sonic high to cut him a look, dark eyes flashing. Johnny winks in place of an apology or reigning it back in. He is at the mercy of no eyes on earth save one pair. And somehow, those exact eyes are here tonight, caught in the headlights of Johnny’s gaze. After the decrescendo is over and the feedback picks up the slack, he raises one stick like a hand in class. He points it at LaRusso. <em>Wait</em>, he mouths, leaning forward to pin him harder in place with his gaze and gesture. He’s five seconds from leaping over his kit and into the crowd. If the guy even thinks of bolting, Johnny’ll do it. He was born to chase LaRusso down.</p><p>LaRusso’s eyes widen even more—seriously, what the hell with this Bambi schtick? But he swallows and shrugs, nodding. Getting a little eyeroll action in there somehow, an irritable huff of breath pooching out his lower lip, his big teeth shining in the haze. Classic fucking LaRusso. Still a little twerp toeing Johnny’s last nerve. But goddamn. He might finally be able to admit that he likes it.</p><p>Johnny doesn’t know what he’s gonna say to LaRusso’s face when he’s finally up close to it again. He’ll think of something. He doesn’t have to help tear down the stage because the drumkit is shared with another band so Johnny doesn’t have to lug his kit back and forth on the 405. It appears and disappears like magic, and he doesn’t have to worry about it. It’s a bit of a shitheap all cobbled together, but it sounds okay, and nobody cares as long as he can keep tempo. He’s learned to live with the imperfections of convenience. He didn’t even want to come here tonight, for obvious reasons, but he promised Carmen, and she would kill him where he stands if he ever let her down. He likes that about her. He likes that she doesn’t need him but expects something from him anyway and he’d better deliver. He’s a sucker for a firecracker is what he is.</p><p>Speaking of.</p><p>He almost loses LaRusso in the crowd. It kind of swallows him up. He catches Johnny’s eye and flicks his head toward the fire exit, which is propped open to let out the muggy exhalations of so many bodies moving so many ways. Johnny follows him, even though it would make more sense for him to follow Johnny, who is impossible to miss or to lose. But he guesses there’s gotta be some give and take here, and he lets LaRusso lead the way. Anybody else would misplace him. But Johnny has been zeroed in on him in ways nobody else could dream of since he was sixteen and only wanted to get his hands around his neck. Ways he himself doesn’t look at too closely even now, shouldering a path through a sea of warm and willing bodies in favour of the prickliest little mouthy jerk he has ever known. He feels hands on his shoulders and arms, people trying to drag his attention into their little orbits. Someone even grabs his ass, which is nothing new either, but he ignores them, pressing a warning elbow into the ribs of the grabby one. He follows Daniel, whose name he only admits he knows in dreams. Johnny could follow him with his eyes closed and his feet busted to the ends of the goddamn earth, not even knowing what for. He doesn’t tell himself this. He doesn’t need to.</p><p>When he’s finally disgorged out into the sultry air of the alleyway with its stink of piss and food wrappers, LaRusso is waiting for him, leaning up against the chipped brickwork like a greaser in some old movie. Johnny takes a minute to just look him over. Take him back in, as if he’d ever left Johnny’s mind. Daniel doesn’t look at him right away, but he’s well aware that Johnny’s there. That they are alone together in the partial darkness. His shoulders are hunched, and his foot presses back against the wall like maybe he needs the reassurance of a launchpad. Johnny still has sixty pounds plus on him and at least six inches. Some things never change. Something inside of him is <em>glad</em>.</p><p>LaRusso looks the same but not the same. His hair is longer, not so floofy. He probably washes it less, like everyone else these days, courtesy of those screamers up in Seattle. It waves and curls a little over LaRusso’s collar, finger-combed to the side. It has the dark sheen of feathers under the halo of streetlight. His eyes are huge and dark in his face, taking up a ridiculous amount of real estate. Always those goddamn Bambi eyes. But they look sadder. Smudged underneath, like he’s been exhausted for awhile. Maybe he has nightmares too. Nightmares about Johnny calling for and finding him. Maybe being found isn’t the happy ending of Daniel’s version of the dream. Maybe it’s Johnny who buries him, or who he hides from. As if compared to Johnny Lawrence, an earthquake tucking him in is better than Johnny ever finding him alive.</p><p>“So it <em>is</em> you,” he says finally. His voice is raspy. A slight edge of familiar belligerence. Though he sounds less like Jersey and more like nowhere at all. “I thought I was hallucinating this whole weird scene.”</p><p>Johnny shrugs. Comes closer. Not too close, but close. “Yeah. Same. When I saw you in the crowd, I thought somebody’d slipped me something.” His own voice sounds lighter than he’d like. Softer. But then his voice has always been that way. It’s part of what he’s always had to prove himself about. <em>You sound like a creampuff, kid. Whatsamatter, your balls haven’t dropped yet? C’mere. I’ll drop ’em for ya, free of charge.</em> It’s never deepened enough to match the rest of him, but that’s what the rest of him is for.</p><p>LaRusso watches him, eyes glittering. Unfathomable. Johnny can’t tell what he’s thinking. He never probably could. But he’s thinking maybe he wanted to. That wanting to was part of the problem. He can smell a hint of LaRusso’s cologne, something unusual, exotic. He can’t figure out what it is. He presses himself against the brick, leaving space between them. Facing LaRusso, his shoulder scraping against the rough old stucco where it hasn’t fully fallen away. He’s got no jacket. He left it inside. But the night is fuggy with heat and feels like a messy kiss on his bare skin. Daniel has too many clothes on and something about that seems like a defense, like even the bare night is some kind of threat.</p><p>“Anybody that’d drug you must have a screw loose,” LaRusso says, finally. “I mean, what the hell would they do next? You’re not exactly a lightweight.”</p><p>Johnny shrugs again, smirking slightly at the backhanded insult. “People love to mess with each other. You of all people should know that.”</p><p>LaRusso frowns then, the slight ease in tension tightening back up again, and Johnny could punch himself for pushing it. LaRusso has always been touchy. And they aren’t exactly on good terms. Not exactly <em>not</em>, either. “What do you want, Johnny? Like. I didn’t come here to bother you. I didn’t have any clue you’d be here. I don’t know why I came inside let alone stayed. I felt compelled, a bit, I guess you could say. It’s so weird. It’s just. So weird. What the hell even is this place now?”</p><p>Johnny tries not to shrug again and loses. “It’s somewhere to be,” he says. “I don’t know. People like making cool uses of forgotten spaces. It’s not like it’s any good for anything else. Feels like maybe this is a way to clean the pipes, or whatever. Flush out the ghosts.”</p><p>“Ghosts like us, I guess, huh?”</p><p>“Yeah. Pretty much.” Johnny turns, letting his shoulders hold up his weight. He looks into the darkness beyond the stutter of streetlight and wonders what LaRusso was even looking at while he waited. What he sees when he and Johnny turn their eyes in the same direction. “I didn’t wanna come here either,” he offers. “But I kinda have to turn up where I’m told. Rule of the gig.”</p><p>“It’s wild,” LaRusso says. “So wild, you drumming like that. I don’t know. I never woulda figured. But at the same time, it makes sense. It’s kinda like fighting, in a way. Though I don’t know who the enemy is. Bad music?”</p><p>Johnny snorts. “Yeah, you got it. It’s a neverending war.”</p><p>“Perfect for you, then, huh.’</p><p>Johnny swallows and nods. <em>Why do you have to always fight, huh? </em>“Yeah. I’m always looking for constructive ways to channel my aggression.”</p><p>LaRusso slides his gaze over. Johnny can feel it on the side of his face. “You know what? I get that. Maybe more than most people think. But I figure you’re the one person who knows that about me.”</p><p>“Yeah, great. That’s a cool thing to have in common, for sure. Jesus, LaRusso.”</p><p>“I always thought…” Daniel hesitates, chewing his lip. It might be the warm glow of neon lights that seems to gild every dark corner of this city, but it looks like he flushes slightly. Johnny pretends not to notice like he pretends not to follow the way his throat moves, swallowing words and then letting them crawl back up again to fight with his tongue.</p><p>“Thought what?”</p><p>“I don’t know. Like maybe there was more we might have in common, or something. Probably stupid, I guess.”</p><p>Johnny gives in right away and shrugs. “Not that crazy. We never really had a chance to find out.” His heart is <em>not</em> picking up. He’s totally cool. The coolest.</p><p>“I thought about asking,” LaRusso admits. “Back then. You know, after everything. But you seemed like maybe you just wanted to be left alone.”</p><p>“Yeah, well. I was. So if I did, I got what I wanted.”</p><p>“Whaddya mean? You always had more friends than anybody else.”</p><p>“Sure, if you say so. But really, things were never the same after that. Only me and Bobby really kept in touch. Sometimes Tommy. But only Bobby really calls or comes around.” He flicks his eyes over at Daniel, gauging his reaction to Johnny mentioning the names of two of his other tormenters. When Daniel’s expression remains neutral, possibly even opening up slightly, Johnny pushes on. “He was always real sorry, you know. About what happened. About what he did at the tournament. It’s really not who he is, you know? I mean, the guy’s <em>Pastor</em> Bobby now, so that should say something about him, right? Something more real than who he was in high school.”</p><p>Daniel nods. “Yeah, I had that figured out the way he immediately started apologizing and everything. I know he was better than all of that stuff.”</p><p>Johnny turns to look at him, crossing his arms. Trying to be cool. Honest. All that stuff he wishes came easier to him than it does. He’s been working on it. Maybe even for this moment. He doesn’t know what Daniel’s talking about when he asks, “What about you, though.”</p><p>Johnny stares, furrowing slightly. “What about me, what?”</p><p>“Is it who you were?”</p><p>Johnny’s mouth pulls down. He and LaRusso look at each other for a long moment. Of course the little punk isn’t gonna back down first. Or ever. Johnny exhales, slowly and audibly, scraping his teeth over his lip, which is chapped like hell and the sting is bracing. “Yeah. It was. I’m not gonna lie about that to you of all people. But not anymore, LaRusso. It’s not me anymore. I don’t expect you to believe that, but maybe you’ll let me prove it.” He doesn’t know he’s gonna say it until he already has. And he realizes it’s true. Whatever it means, he means it. He flushes, but he straightens up to stand by it visibly as well as inside himself.</p><p>Daniel looks shocked like only LaRusso can look. His mouth falls open a little bit, and Johnny can see the sheen on his inner lip and it makes him feel some kind of way he’s not sure he wants to deal with right this second, even if he recognizes it. His gut clenches in, and he feels the burn of embarrassment start to light his skin on fire, but then LaRusso says, “Okay, Johnny.”</p><p>Johnny smiles. Like an asshole. Not at a figment this time, but at a real boy. At Daniel in the warm brown flesh and unbroken bone.</p><p>LaRusso smiles back. A tired surrendering sort of weary thing that pulls on one side of his lush mouth and leaves the other side neutral. But Johnny will take it. He’ll take it and he will run with it as far and as fast as LaRusso will let him and then some. “Alright, LaRusso,” he says. “Good talk.”</p>
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<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Chapter 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Daniel visits Johnny where he lives now. He doesn't expect two California blonds for the price of one, but he's always been lucky like that.</p>
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    <p>Daniel has never been to the storied Venice Canals. Hell, he’s never been to Venice Beach, period. He only has the vaguest sense of the Miracle Mile and Muscle Beach, and really only from movies. It’s another world attached to his own by the harrowing umbilical cord of the 405. Daniel parked the De Luxe in a precarious spot a couple of blocks away, praying he wouldn’t get a ticket, and walked the rest of the way, down the canalside paths. Over a quaint bridge. He got lost a couple of times but Johnny didn’t give him any kind of specific time, just <em>I get home by five on weeknights</em>. <em>I don’t wake up til noon on weekends, so anytime past two is cool. I don’t usually go anywhere until the heat breaks other than the beach. If I’m not home, I’m there.</em>  His tone casual, but with something more going on. Daniel wasn’t sure how to read it. But it sounded like it was Johnny hoping he’d show up sometime, just like he said.</p><p>Daniel wanders around, looking for Johnny, trying to imagine his life here. He feels like he’s inside somebody’s dream of Hollywoodland. Little boats the colour of pillow mints bob in the canal, tethered to the banks. He can see right to the bottom of the water. It doesn’t look dirty but it doesn’t look clean. No fish. No little kids. No swimming allowed, he presumes. The sun beats down on his neck and he is overdressed as usual. He’s never quite gotten the hang of California casual, of soft T-shirts in ice-cream hues. Checkered Madras button-downs left hanging open and crumply over muscle shirts. He wears shorts sometimes but only if he has a reason, like going to the beach or the lake.</p><p>In the end, he finds the house by not really looking for it. He lets it reveal itself in its own time. When Johnny scrawled his address on the back of Daniel’s hand and said, <em>The corner of Grand and Linnie Canals. You can’t miss it. Everything’s pink, including the car</em>—he wasn’t messing with him. Everything is pink. Including the car.</p><p>Daniel ducks around back to double check. Sure enough, tucked away as neat as a pin next to Johnny’s bike he finds a classic 1966 Volvo Amazon the deep fuchsia of sakura buds. The house is just as pink, but a softer shade. A fairy tale bungalow with a lemon yellow door and aquamarine shutters too small to be useful, but they sure look pretty, like eyeshadow artfully applied to the eyelids of a bashful girl. The tiled roof is steep-pitched and the shingles under the eaves look like the scales of a flamingo-coloured mermaid. He feels like the little house is laughing at his amazement, but in a nice way. Like a lady behind a fan in some old movie he doesn’t understand.</p><p>Daniel thought Mr. Miyagi’s little jade green house was unreal. This place gives it a run for its money. The tiny pink sugar cube kind of makes its more ostentatious neighbours look overdone. It’s like a glamourous grandmother wearing an Isadora Duncan scarf and cats-eye sunglasses amidst a sea of supermodels with exaggerated pouty lips. Not all of the houses are like that, but enough of them that the house matching the number he transcribed so carefully stands out. He still doesn’t quite believe Johnny lives here. He has no idea how he fits his shoulders through the door day in and day out without a constant parade of bruises. But then, Johnny is as graceful as a cat. A big, hungry cat. Daniel has always been more of a dog person. Maybe because he <em>is</em> more of a dog in human form, if people were animals. Yeah, he’d be a molasses-eyed overeager barker of a dog who gets easily offended but always comes back for more whether it be kicks or pets or thrown sticks. Daniel does know himself.</p><p>What he <em>doesn’t</em> know is what to do next. He knows he should just bite the bullet and knock, but he’s nervous. Daniel has no context whatsoever to the concept of Johnny Lawrence at home. When they were kids, he knew Johnny lived in the Encino hills. This is a far cry from that world, and it’s reassuring. Daniel will never forget the shame he felt pulling up in front of Ali’s house in his ma’s old clunker. He’ll never let himself forget it because he’s ashamed of the shame itself. He still hopes his ma doesn’t remember it like he does. Or didn’t understand what he was feeling, that white hot poker of irrational humiliation that has nothing to do with how he feels about her and how she raised him, all on her own after Daniel’s dad passed. They were never going to be wealthy people. Daniel isn’t sure anyone should be wealthy. Living like this, in this tiny confectionary house so close to the beach, and like he does with Mr. Miyagi at the little paper window haven, seems like the best possible good fortune. The kind that doesn’t spoil anyone. It just makes them grateful and happy.</p><p>The tiny porch seems like it belongs on a dollhouse. Of course it fits Daniel perfectly. He stands there for way too long, staring at the knocker on the perfectly painted lemon chiffon door. At the plaque affixed beneath it that looks like it was glazed and fired in a kiln with the words <em>Johnny &amp; Laura Live Here </em>etched into it in a childish scrawl, the motto framed by two handprints, a small one flanking the ‘Johnny’ and a larger but delicate one flanking ‘Laura’. Polished beach stones and iridescent shells and fragile sand dollars decorate its corners. Daniel presses a single brown fingertip into the center of the smaller handprint, as if those tiny fingers might come to life and grab onto him. For some reason, this makes his heart ache. He doesn’t know why. He blinks. His eyes sting. He’s being totally ridiculous, and he knows it. <em>C’mon, man. Get it together.</em></p><p>Daniel is about to reach for the knocker and give the door a rap when he sees a flutter of gauzy curtain from his periphery, and the door opens inward. He sees moonlight blond hair. He sees sparkling blue eyes. He sees golden skin. But he’s not looking at Johnny.</p><p>“Um,” he says intelligently. Or as intelligently as he can, confronted by the competing Most Gorgeous Blonde in California. It’s ridiculous how Johnny Laurence seems to be the second coming of the woman standing in front of him. She’s smaller. Much smaller. Shorter than Daniel is now, though they were probably neck and neck when he was in high school. She is Johnny distilled into a more delicate vessel. California Dream Boy clearly got his genes from somewhere. “Mrs. Lawrence?” he says tentatively.</p><p>She stares at him for a second and smiles. Warm. Reassuring. A little bit mischievous. Her eyes lean towards periwinkle where her son’s are oceanic. It’s a beautiful contrast. “Are you Daniel LaRusso?” she says, her soft cheeks dimpling.</p><p>“I, uh. Didn’t know Johnny knew my first name,” he says.</p><p>She lets out a peel of laughter that sounds like a windchime. “Oh, he knows it. Come in, Daniel.”</p><p>Daniel blinks, unsure of how to handle the fact that the woman responsible for the existence of Johnny Lawrence on this earth has just said his name to him two more times than Johnny ever has. “Okay, thanks a lot.”</p><p>He follows her through the pretty little door and toes his shoes off on the mat, bending to line them up neatly next to a kicked off pair of well-worn sand-encrusted checkerboard Vans. He rolls his eyes at the difference in size but smiles at the colours Johnny chose: bright aquamarine and fluorescent orange slip-ons with a neon green stripe. Not exactly Cobra Kai approved, he’s guessing. He finds that both reassuring and endearing.</p><p>He bypasses a cozy living room he doesn’t get much of a chance to examine, but it has a feeling of bohemian charm, playful colours nudging the edge of his vision like blown kisses. He follows the sound of Laura’s voice into a snug little kitchen filled with warm light, skylit and gleaming. Sunlight splashes over terracotta tiles laid out in a honeycomb pattern beneath his feet. He gazes around at the whimsical vintage robin's egg blue appliances, though the fridge is as pink as the outside of the house. It seems to be a theme running throughout: pink like the tongue of a sweet soft animal, or a scoop of ice cream melting over a child’s chubby fist. Pink like Johnny Laurence’s lips and his mother’s dimpled cheeks.</p><p>Daniel leans to examine the sand dollar and seashell backsplash filling the space between the butcher board countertop and the open shelves above. “Wow,” he says. “This place is something else. Are those real shells?”</p><p>Laura smiles at him, fluttering around the kitschy space in a long flowing sundress the colour of sunsets in Malibu. “Johnny collected every single one the summer he was five,” she tells him. “He was obsessed. And now, every morning I wake up and see them in the sunlight, it’s like that little guy I loved so much is always with me. They never tell you how many times you lose your child even when you’re lucky enough that he’s still standing there, towering over you and practically crushing you when he still lets you give him a hug.”</p><p>Laura looks wistful, but in a really nice way. Daniel sees Johnny in her face, but different, too. The same face given to two different people. It used to be like that with him and his dad. People used to say it all the time and it made him feel all kinds of ways at once. Now there’s no one to say it. Not on this coast. So Daniel knows something about what it’s like to lose someone over and over. It never occurred to him that it could happen with the living. Now he’s going to be thinking about that. He knows he will. He thinks too much but it’s who he is and he can’t escape.</p><p>“I never thought about it like that,” he says softly as Mrs. Lawrence presses an oversized mug into his hands, steaming up an unplaceable fragrance into his face. He leans into the steam and inhales. “Wow,” he says.</p><p>“I hope you like tea. Come, sit with me.”</p><p>“I love tea,” he says. And he does. He sits down with her at a cute little Formica table and chair set from another era, all speckles and chrome with mint green leatherette seats like a diner booth where waitresses on roller skates serve milkshakes and french fries. “Mmm. Smells great. What is it?”</p><p>“Lavender and eucalyptus,” she says. “Your voice sounds a little hoarse so I thought it might help. A squeeze of lemon and a hint of honey, too. Fix you right up.”</p><p>Daniel blinks at her, flushing with confused pleasure. No one’s paid this close of attention to him other than Mr. Miyagi since his ma went back to Jersey. “Thank you. My voice always sounds like this, but maybe it’s a little scratchier than normal.” His eyes widen, and he scrambles to explain, sloshing the hot liquid over his wrist.  “I’m not sick or anything. I wouldn’t have come over if I was. I hate people who do that.”</p><p>Laura laughs again. She seems like someone who laughs as easily as breathing, and it <em>is </em>natural—not a nervous tick or anything. It sounds so pretty and so sincere, Daniel just wants to find new ways to make it happen all day long. “Don’t worry, I didn’t think that. Please sit down. Relax. Tell me about yourself, Daniel. Johnny doesn’t ask people over too often. Let’s make him nervous by getting along like a house on fire.”</p><p>Daniel laughs and sips at the tea, blowing ripples over the surface. “He did, you know. Ask me. I swear I’m not just dropping by. Well, I am. But Johnny said it was okay. I hope he really wanted me to, or else this’ll be real awkward.”</p><p>“If Johnny actually told you where we live, then that’s the sincerest invitation he’s ever made. He’s not really very social.”</p><p>Daniel stares at her. “You’re kidding.”</p><p>Laura shakes her blonde head, cradling her own mug. She smiles, and something about it is a bit sad. “He’s never had an easy time making friends. Don’t tell him I told you that. I shouldn’t, only—I think it’s something you should know.”</p><p>Daniel chokes a little on his tea, which is really good. Soothing. Nothing like Mr. Miyagi’s tea, but just as comforting in its own way. “Why me in particular?”</p><p>Laura cocks her head, chewing her soft pink lip. Sunlight sifts through the tumble of her hair, and it reminds Daniel again of her son. Not that he needs a reminder lately. He seems always to be thinking about Johnny, everything reminding him of natural blond and golden skin. “It’s not something I can explain. I just know it’s true. He’s not what he might have seemed like, back then. I just hope you’ll give him a chance to show you who he is. Who he’s always been.”</p><p>Something inside of Daniel cracks open to leak sweet and stinging into his heart when she says that. Her soft blue eyes fill with a mother’s anxiety. He knows the look. He can <em>hear </em>it even when he can’t see it, every time he talks to his ma on the phone and she wants to know what he’s doing with himself <em>other </em>than work. “Hey, I’m completely open to that,” Daniel assures her. “I know what it’s like not to act like myself and have it get away on me, believe me. I’m in no position to hold anything over anyone.”</p><p>Laura’s smile spreads over her sweet face, crinkling the soft mauve of her eyeshadow. She reaches across the table to grasp his hand, and though it surprises Daniel, he loves the spontaneity of her warmth. He flushes with pleasure, and feels his own smile widening in a way it hasn’t in some time. Not this naturally. Not half so sincerely. He’s been in a bit of a gloomy rut lately, and this woman, the small house with its arms around them, Daniel’s hand in hers. Well, it makes him feel like a person in some way that he didn’t realize he’d been missing. He lets out a breath some part of him was holding, and squeezes her hand back.</p><p>He’s so distracted he doesn’t hear anyone come into the kitchen behind him. A hand claps down on his shoulder, squeezing down and pulling him back so he lets go of Laura’s hand and jumps a little, sloshing even more of the tea all over like he’s some kind of clumsy teenager.</p><p>He cranes his head back to look into Johnny’s narrowed eyes. He thinks the giant blond might be holding back a smile, but that’s not necessarily anything to be relieved about in Daniel’s experience.</p><p>“You’re not gonna fall in love with my mom, or anything, are you, twerp?” Johnny says.  “She’s single but she’s not looking. And I really don’t need a new stepdaddy, squirt. Especially not one half my size on the best day of his life.”</p><p>Daniel’s mouth drops open in outrage. “What? No, man! What the hell.”</p><p>Johnny rolls his eyes. “It wouldn’t be the first time. Tommy used to follow her around like a little puppy. And don’t even get me started on Dutch. And you’re the kinda guy who probably falls in love with every woman he meets.”</p><p>Daniel flushes, snatching his hand back completely and jerking his shoulder out of Johnny’s grip, unsure if they’re actually on dangerous ground or not.</p><p>“Now, Johnny,” Laura says, frowning as much as she’s probably even capable. “That’s enough.”</p><p>Johnny drags another chair out and sits down, smirking at him in that old way that used to turn Daniel’s stomach to liquid, drowning the butterflies that always seemed to show up at the same time. He swallows, thinking maybe this was a big mistake. Maybe he read Johnny all wrong that night at the old dojo.</p><p>Laura reaches over to poke her son in the chest, tapping warningly with a single polished fingertip. “Johnny, you <em>quit</em> that. Be a sweet boy and have some tea with us.”</p><p>Johnny rolls his eyes, but Daniel can see from a mile away how his face softens when he looks at her. Daniel relaxes slightly, watching them over the rim of his mug. “Hell no, Mom. You know I hate that hippy flower shit. Gross. I’ll take a beer.”</p><p>“You’ll take tea and like it, young man. You need the electrolytes.”</p><p>Johnny grimaces. “No way, thanks. I’ll chance dehydration.”</p><p>Laura rolls her eyes right back, getting up to take her mug to the sink. “Have it your own way. You’ve got your own fridge, the contents of which I don’t need to know. Preserve a mother’s innocence. Why don’t you take Daniel and show him your room? I’ll be in my studio for the rest of the afternoon. You boys have fun.” Laura leans down to kiss her overgrown son on her way out the sunny patio door. He doesn’t shrug her off like Daniel thought he might. Like Daniel himself might, if it was his ma in front of Johnny. Instead, Johnny looks up at her like she’s the literal sun in his life and lets her stroke his thicket of blond hair. “Be nice to Daniel, Johnny,” Laura says in only a half-undertone, “Or he’ll think you don’t like him.”</p><p>Johnny scoffs. “Good, cuz I’m still deciding.”</p><p>Laura ruffles his hair a little harder, like a tender warning, and stops by Daniel’s chair to touch his cheek gently. “Don’t listen to him. He’s a terrible liar, anyway. It was wonderful to meet you, Daniel. Please stay as long as you want, and don’t be a stranger.”</p><p>“Thank you, Mrs. Lawrence, that’s real good of you. I won’t.”</p><p>“Mom,” Johnny says. “Come on.”</p><p>Laura smiles at him beatifically and sashays out of the room, taking at least half of the light with her. Daniel watches her go, still flushing slightly.</p><p>“Hey,” Johnny says, slamming his hand down on the table to get Daniel’s attention. “Snap out of it. I wasn’t kidding around, man.”</p><p>“What? Come on, Johnny. I was just being friendly.”</p><p>“Oh sure, where have I heard <em>that </em>before<em>. </em>You and girls, LaRusso. Don’t think I don’t know where that goes.”</p><p>“Okay, yeah, but not like that. Okay? Jeez. I just. Feel more comfortable around women.” He narrows his own eyes at Johnny this time.  “Gee, I wonder why that is.”</p><p>Johnny returns Daniel’s expression with that old familiar dangerous smirk. “Okay. Good. Wanna see my room? I have beer.”</p><p>Daniel blinks. “Yeah, man. Lead the way. I’m starting to feel like I need one, for some reason.”</p><p>“Oh, you do. Believe me. Help you relax. You look like you’re about ready to jump out of your skin.” Johnny gets up, his height and shoulders seeming to fill the whole kitchen. He saunters out, waving Daniel to follow.</p><p>“Yeah, I wonder why,” Daniel mutters. But he realizes he’s not really on edge. It’s something else. He follows Johnny’s lazy prowl, taking in the loose pair of board shorts he’s wearing, the flex and bunch of his powerful calves as he walks. The sight of Johnny’s naked toes tensing on the tiles is oddly moving. Daniel’s seen Johnny’s bare feet before, but this is different. No fighting stance. No threat. Just Johnny Lawrence at home. Where he has invited Daniel to visit him. To follow him deeper into his sanctuary. Daniel does so helplessly, drawn along, curious, compelled. Ever so slightly thrilled.</p><p>“Come <em>on</em>, LaRusso. Keep up,” Johnny says, tossing his hair to throw Daniel a look over the powerful shoulder straining his soft T-shirt.</p><p>Daniel swallows. He follows. His wrist tingles where the hot tea scalded him and he presses a thumb into the burn. It anchors him. Reminds him this is no fever dream. He is here. He is alive on this earth and Johnny Lawrence wants him around. Probably.</p>
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<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Chapter 4</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Daniel and Johnny spend time together in Johnny's bedroom. Slow burns are slowwwwww, people. Might as well get comfy. Don't forget to hydrate and maybe get a snack while you wait for these thirsty snacks to get a damned clue!</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Johnny is always the wrong size and shape. He used to be small. Sid’s giant house had swallowed him up, and no matter how much he grew, he always shrank back down as soon as he crossed the threshold. Now this house that once fit him perfectly when Johnny was tiny strains at the seams around him. Johnny’s grown even more since high school, shooting up over six feet once they’d moved back to Venice. It’s comical the way he has to duck through doorways and hunch under the showerhead in the pink-and-aqua Deco bathroom that’s never been remodeled since the house was built and, barring disaster, never would be. He’s too big for this dainty little house, but he feels safe here. Strong in a way he’d been trained not to acknowledge or need, and sometimes he still can’t, but the house takes care of him anyway. It’s a good kind of too small, like the squeezed tight feeling of his feet in a favourite pair of shoes he can still slip on even though they’re last year’s size. He can breathe here. He can just <em>be</em>.</p><p>There is no one barging in between him and Laura now. No one ripping them apart at the heart, those painful strings straining and itching. It’s been years now, and he feels like they’re still dragging up the slack of how far they had to tear away from each other. How far Johnny pulled away from her to protect them both, with Laura doing the same thing on the other end of the line. It still hurts sometimes, catching him off guard. But Johnny still adores the ground Laura walks on, so everything is okay. Everything’s cool. They’re making it work real nice here in Venice. They’re making it all work.</p><p>And now, the surrealest thing has happened: LaRusso has come to visit. He’s following Johnny to his actual bedroom like they’re friends, or something. Johnny can hardly believe it. He wants to keep turning around to look at him, like in one of those confusing Greek myths where everything goes to shit as soon as you turn around when you promised you wouldn’t. Johnny hasn’t made any such agreement, but he restrains himself the rest of the way to his room, because you never know. Daniel could melt away in front of his very eyes, like in a nightmare. The weirdest part is the way LaRusso is so damned quiet. This is the least he’s ever talked except during a math test, or something. It’s unnerving.</p><p>“Say something, LaRusso. This isn’t a funeral or anything. Not taking you to the gallows, Mary Antoinette.”</p><p>“Guillotine,” LaRusso says in his always slightly belligerent tone, because of <em>course</em> he can’t resist. Typical. “Gallows are where people are hanged. If I was Mary Antoinette, you’d be cutting my head off, stupid hairdo and all.”</p><p>Johnny snorts, rolling his eyes as pushes his door open. “Oh, great. There’s the old LaRusso I know. Correcting me for saying something stupid not a half hour into our reunion. Real classy. But hey, at least I got the stupid hairdo part right in my, y’know. Metaphor.”</p><p>“Gee, thanks. At least it was the dumb hair that made you figure out the comparison. Not that Mary and me are both girls. That’s progress.”</p><p>“I don’t know,” Johnny quips, reaching to pull LaRusso into the room with him and nearly spilling the rest of the tea he’s carting around. “I think you’d make an okay girl.”</p><p>“Thanks, man,” LaRusso says, rolling his eyes. “Like I haven’t heard that one before. Though you’ve never said I’d be an okay girl, only that I <em>am</em> one. So maybe there’s hope for me yet in your eyes.”</p><p>Johnny studies him. “I don’t think I ever called you a girl.”</p><p>“Oh yeah? Must’ve been one of your cronies. I seem to recall some blond psychopath or other calling me <em>Danielle</em> while he threatened my life. Hard to keep track of which one.”</p><p><em>Well, well, well, if it isn’t our little friend Danielle… </em>Johnny frowns. “Yeah, well. Dutch is in Lompoc right now serving five to ten, so. No one’s calling you Danielle anymore. And my personal blond psychopath days are over.” He lifts his eyes, looking LaRusso in the face. He doesn’t apologize again. It wouldn’t sound very sincere right this second. But he doesn’t deny anything, either. He never will. And that’s part of being sorry, Johnny thinks.</p><p>LaRusso stares at him for a moment, holding the big purple-glazed pottery mug Laura fixed his tea in. It looks ridiculous in his hands, like he’s a little kid trying hard not to spill. His mouth pulls down, his big eyes dark as a midnight window. “Sorry to hear that, man. I don’t wish that on anybody. I hope he’ll be okay in there.”</p><p>Johnny nods. “Yeah. I don’t know. I don’t hear from him much. He calls sometimes but there isn’t much to say. I think he lies more than he tells the truth about what it’s like for him. I don’t know whether that’s good or bad, you know?”</p><p>The smaller man nods, listening real close to what Johnny’s saying like he actually cares, as if every single syllable lands inside of him and he stacks them all up to consider their complete meaning. Johnny flushes, clearing his throat and trying not to fall into those ridiculous Bambi eyes just because they’re glued to his face.</p><p>LaRusso tugs his eyes away to look around Johnny’s room. If he thinks it’s weird that Johnny’s living with his mom at their age, he doesn’t say anything. LaRusso’s never struck Johnny as someone who thinks like other people, so maybe it doesn’t even occur to him to think anything of it.</p><p>“Your mom said something about a studio. She’s an artist?” Daniel asks. “What does she, like, make, or whatever?</p><p>Johnny points. “You’re holding it. She calls her studio Pink Moon Pottery. She does great at the farmer’s market. She sells a lot of stuff to the very Encino bitches who never liked her. She charges them double. Asshole tax. Who’s the dumb blonde now?”</p><p>Daniel’s eyes go huge with wonder. “No way! Seriously? This is beautiful!” He uses that word like it’s natural, no big deal for a guy, and for him, it isn’t. He never seems to worry how words sound. He caresses the plump belly of Laura’s mug with some kind of reverence that, because this is LaRusso, is nothing but completely sincere and spontaneous. “My ma would go crazy for this stuff. I should send her something. And maybe she could make some bonsai pots for the shop. I’ll ask her when I see her next.” Johnny can tell he means that, too. Goddamned LaRusso. Johnny swallows, trying not to track the lazy trail of Daniel’s fingers.</p><p>“Sure, she’s into all that nature shit.” <em>Come on, Johnny. Snap out of it. Same little jerk he always was, right? What’s your damage? </em>“Hey, do you actually want a beer? You don’t have to, but I will if you will.”</p><p>“Oh sure, yeah, why not? I don’t drink much, but it’s hot, you know? Sometimes Sprite just doesn’t do the trick, right?”</p><p>“In my experience, Sprite never does the trick. Plus, it tastes like drain cleaner. Something that tastes that bad should at least give you a buzz.”</p><p>LaRusso chuckles. “Yeah, I guess. Never thought about it like that.”</p><p>“That’s why I’m here,” Johnny tells him, leaning down to open the mini fridge in the corner. He fishes out two Coors Banquets and passes one to Daniel. The cans start to sweat immediately in the heat. The bungalow doesn’t have air conditioning, but Johnny doesn’t mind. He was made for the heat. “Aren’t you hot, man? You look like you’re dressed for October. You’ve been here long enough to know how to dress for the climate, haven’t you?”</p><p>Daniel shrugs, holding his beer in one hand and Laura’s tea in the other. He looks even stupider, which makes him kind of cuter, too. “I don’t know why I always overdress. Can’t seem to break the habit.”</p><p>“Don’t they make clothes in your size, or are you just ashamed of shopping at Kid Gap? It’s okay, I’m sure there’re lots of other guys made like you. You know, twelve-year-olds small for their age.”</p><p>“Screw you, jerk!” LaRusso says, shaking his can of beer at Johnny in a truly dumb move. Johnny shoves down the way that general insult makes his heart kick up like it’s saying <em>Okay, sure. When?</em> Like, <em>God</em>. Get a grip, Lawrence. Seriously.</p><p>Johnny lunges across the carpet towards LaRusso, snatching the slick can from his grip and opening it for him. The shaken beer whooshes up out of the opening immediately. Johnny catches it, sucking up the foam until it settles down. “Jesus, LaRusso, and I thought you were supposed to be the smart one. Physics class hero, and all that. Shit, man. I think I drank half, but that’s probably about right for you, huh?” He pries the mug out of LaRusso’s fingers and replaces it with the can that he’s just slobbered all over, but it serves LaRusso right, wasting perfectly mediocre beer like that.</p><p>“What? I don’t have cooties. I’d trade you for mine, but these are my last two and I don’t want half a beer just because you can’t control your damn hands. I make you nervous or something?”</p><p>“Yeah. Of course you do.” Daniel flushes, dropping his gaze. Which might be a first. Probably in his entire life. He furrows his brow, pulling his soft lower lip into his mouth to chew on it, like he does when he’s uncomfortable. There’s this pulse in his throat frantically trying to betray something, if Johnny could only figure out what, exactly.</p><p>“Oh.” Johnny hadn’t expected him to be honest, but this is LaRusso, after all. He doesn’t exactly keep a single thought to himself or a feeling from parading itself across his expressive face. Johnny can feel himself go pink. He can blame the heat. But he knows Daniel will see right through him if he mentions it. “Well, yeah,” he says. Like that’s some kind of answer. “I mean, I’m pretty intimidating.”</p><p>Daniel huffs and rolls his eyes theatrically. But he’s not disagreeing. Johnny hasn’t missed that by a mile, any more than he’s missed the thick flutter of LaRusso’s long dark lashes. He can’t ever remember noticing eyelashes before, not even Ali’s. He can’t remember Ali’s eyes at all. Were they green? Hazel? Whatever. It was so long ago, all Johnny can really remember is her laugh. Not the nice one that meant he was cute—the one that meant <em>No Way in Hell, Loser.</em> He doesn’t know when the memory of that sharp and brittle sound stopped being able to get under the skin of his heart, but it just doesn’t anymore. He wonders if it had anything to do with his real heart at all. The heart that beats so hard right now that it burns.</p><p> </p><p>Daniel isn’t sure how he’d have pictured Johnny’s bedroom before seeing it, but this isn’t exactly it. Unlike the rest of the sunny little house, this room is dim and cool. Blue-toned. The light leaks in from somewhere Daniel can’t pinpoint. It touches Johnny’s hair [like Daniel wants to, <em>goddamn</em>] until the soft platinum is sifted through with gold. That hair should only come from a bottle, but it never could. <em>Eat your heart out Jayne Mansfield</em>, he thinks. <em>You got nothing on this guy. </em>Hollywood should be so lucky, and Venice certainly is.</p><p>“I’m surprised you live in Venice,” Daniel says. “Kinda far from Encino.”</p><p>Johnny scoffs. “I’m <em>from</em> Venice. This is where I was born—like, literally, in this actual house. In case you can’t tell, Laura’s the hippie dippy model of California Barbie. It was all midwives and chanting, apparently. Incense and the full moon, the whole deal. Thank God I don’t remember that shit.”</p><p>Daniel is more than a bit sideswiped by this information. Somehow it seems like the profoundest thing Daniel knows about Johnny. Maybe because it seems like something no one else knows, something Johnny has kept hidden, like the way no one ever knew what he was always listening to in his ever-present headphones way back when. Daniel wonders what could have been avoided or derailed if instead of dumping water on Johnny’s head that Halloween night, he’d just asked what he was listening to instead.</p><p>“Oh,” he says, like his mind isn’t blown. “I didn’t know that.”</p><p>“Yeah, well. We don’t exactly know each other, LaRusso.”</p><p>“But we’re not exactly strangers, either.”</p><p>“I guess that’s true.”</p><p>He looks around Johnny’s bedroom, nursing his beer like he’s ever going to get used to the taste. It’s messy, but in a nice way.  Discarded clothes tossed over the back of a chair. A sloppily made bed that actually looks really cozy and inviting, all rumpled sheets and blue comforter. He bets it smells like citrus detergent mingled with Aqua Velva and musk, just like Johnny. Daniel blinks and averts his gaze, pushing that thought away. <em>What the hell, man? Get a grip</em>. Band posters cover most of the wall space, layered with cut-outs from music magazines and gig leaflets. Daniel doesn’t recognize them all, but he plucks out a few faces and names familiar from seeing playbills plastered on telephone poles and cinderblock walls around the city. Daniel doesn’t really go to concerts. He sticks to the radio.</p><p>He spots the curve and sheen of an electric guitar propped against the wall and wedged behind an amplifier covered with stickers. An acoustic with worn tobacco brown skin pokes out from under the bed. Clearly Johnny can play more than the drums, which Daniel assumes is impressive. He’s impressed, anyway, but he tries not to let it show too hard. A complex configuration of hi-fi equipment, including a turntable and cassette deck, takes up a lot of space on a dressertop. A colourful spill of records in their sleeves erupts over the carpet and onto the edging of bare hardwood that reminds him of the shoe-friendly walkway of a dojo. Only this isn’t a dojo. Nothing even remotely related to karate in sight. Not a single poster or an abandoned hachimaki, let alone a trophy. Daniel remembers what happened to the last one Johnny won. He wouldn’t want the reminder, either. And it’s not like he’s proud of his own last win. Not for the first time, Daniel thinks about how much they actually have in common. And he’s sure they could tell each other some stories if they ever drank enough of these beers. Daniel would probably only need a whole one before his motormouth got the better of him.</p><p>“I like your room,” he says, flushing at the long silence that didn’t feel particularly uncomfortable until he paid attention to it.</p><p>“Yeah? Thanks.” Johnny looks around, shrugging, like he’s never really thought about the quality of his room before.</p><p>“Not that I ever saw your other one. Did it look pretty much like this?”</p><p>“No way, man. There would’ve been hell to pay if I poked holes in Sid’s walls to hang up pictures of pansy musicians instead of Lamborghinis and Brooke Shields. He woulda shit a brick. Hey, maybe I <em>should</em> have hung up, like, Boy George or Twisted Sister. It would’ve been so worth the ass-kicking as long as Sid had a heart attack, too.”</p><p>Daniel files away a lot of that to think over later [<em>Hell to pay. Pansy. Ass-kicking]</em>, saying only, with as much sympathy as he thinks Johnny will allow, “Oh shit. Really? Sorry I asked.”</p><p>“Nah, it’s okay. Doesn’t matter now. I’m glad you didn’t see it, though. My old room. You wouldn’t have liked me there.”</p><p>“Like you would’ve cared.”</p><p>“Yeah. I would have. Maybe. I mean, after everything, I might have cared a little bit.”</p><p>Daniel smiles. He can’t help himself. Something in him goes both prickly and soft, thinking that Johnny had maybe been as lonely in his teenage bedroom as Daniel was. “So why didn’t you ever invite me over? I mean, I wouldn’t’ve said no. Probably. I thought we mostly buried the ten million hatchets we had between us.”</p><p>Johnny’s sharp blue eyes search Daniel’s face impassively. He hesitates. “<em>I</em> didn’t like me there, so. You know. Why drag you into it?”</p><p>Daniel nods thoughtfully. Then he smiles slow. “Wait a minute, Brooke Shields? I <em>so </em>wouldn’t’ve pegged that.”</p><p>“Yeah. I like ’em skinny and titless. Sue me.”</p><p>For some reason that declaration makes Daniel blush like a girl. He doesn’t know why. He doesn’t <em>want</em> to know why. He also doesn’t want to understand why he keeps feeling like a girl around Johnny Lawrence. Can’t a guy blush in front of a cute blond who happens to also be a guy? How does that make him a girl? Good grief. “Oh yeah, since when?” he says, scoffing to hide his reaction. Classic him.</p><p>Johnny only smiles enigmatically. Daniel’s not sure he would even know the meaning of the word, but with Johnny, knowing a word and illustrating it perfectly don’t need to coincide. He’s someone who just <em>is</em> a thing or does it. He’s not like Daniel, thinking it to death before it’s way too late or it’s already happened.</p><p>“Why are we standing around like jerks? Come on, pull up a corner of carpet, or whatever. Let’s sit down. It’s hotter higher in the air, or something, right?” Johnny flops down on the rug, his long legs stretched out and his head tipped back over the side of his mattress. He tilts his can of beer and takes a long ponderous swallow, looking up through the shaded skylight.  </p><p>Daniel follows his lead, refraining from sitting in his now completely instinctive seiza. He stretches out too, leaning back on his elbows, can of beer between his long brown fingers. He doesn’t really get much of a chance to act like the American oaf that he is, and in some ways, he really <em>isn’t </em>anymore. Johnny brings it out in him. Reminds him he’s just a jumped-up Jersey punk getting on the blond’s last nerve. Something about that is invigorating. It makes Daniel feel like himself when what that was used to be simple, surface. What you see is what he is. He’s starting to think that what he’s seen has never been what Johnny is, and that gives him life somehow, too.</p><p>Johnny’s a bit lean, sprawled out on the rug like a teenager. Raw-boned and rangy beneath all of that thrumming power. But a lot of people are these days, like it’s a mass condition among some people, and Daniel has nothing to say about it. He’s always been thin, sure. But something about this era in his life, or in the life of the world, seems to carve something out of people. Thank God the clothes are so baggy now. Daniel can hide how gaunt he is. Johnny isn’t gaunt, but he looks hungry. But maybe that’s just the time they’re living in. Or maybe it was always there. Or maybe he just hasn’t caught up with his own height. He’s grown so much, and yet, he looks like he could grow even more. Sideways, at least. Even so, he’s so much bigger than Daniel it’s laughable. Daniel feels like a child. Daniel hasn’t really grown up in either sense of the word. He needs to stop thinking about Johnny’s body, but it’s just so. <em>There. </em>Impossible to miss. He is the most physical person Daniel has ever met.</p><p>“I don’t know much about music,” Daniel confesses to shut himself up internally, pulling a random record out of the haphazard spread and gazing at it. He would have imagined some kind of hair metal band on the cover, but it’s actually Fleetwood Mac. He spots Cyndi Lauper as well as David Bowie. He sees the familiar staticky black-and-white and bold red of <em>Nebraska </em>and his heart gives a lurch. <em>Johnny listens to Springsteen?</em> “I mean, I just listen to the radio. Oldies sometimes, or whatever is on. Whatever my ma used to play for me when I was a kid.”</p><p>“You don’t have to know anything about it to like it,” Johnny says.</p><p>“I guess so.”</p><p>“So. Do you?”</p><p>“What?”</p><p>“Like it.”</p><p>Daniel hesitates, but smiles. Decides it’s okay to tell the truth about himself. It’s not like there’s anything earthshattering to admit about it. “Yeah. I do. I wish I knew more stuff to listen to, but when you work in horticulture and your best friend’s a nearly-seventy-year-old man, you don’t exactly keep up with MTV.”</p><p>Johnny rolls his eyes. “MTV? I don’t either. That’s not how I know what I like.”</p><p>“How, then?”</p><p>Johnny shrugs. “I go to gigs, whoever’s playing. I’m picky about what I like, but I’ll listen to anything, just to see. And I listen to my mom’s old records she left here when she married Sid. It was all still here. And my uncle Jack’s records. And my sort-of uncle Raymundo left some laying around, too.” He flushes when he says that, looking at Daniel defiantly like there’s something there he could use against him.</p><p>Daniel doesn’t know if he’s being obtuse or what, not picking up on it, but he just says, “Cool. That’s awesome. We had to leave my dad’s records behind when we moved from Jersey. I don’t even remember what he used to listen to, much. I guess that’s pretty sad.”</p><p>“Yeah. The saddest. Maybe you could, I don’t know. Listen to stuff he <em>could’ve</em> liked, you know?”</p><p>Daniel blinks. Sometimes Johnny says stuff that sounds simple until you really listen. He’s starting to notice that about him, and he's starting to really like it. The way Johnny phrases it also lets Daniel off the hook of actually having to say that his dad is dead. Johnny gets it. Daniel can see that he does, and he's grateful. He still hates to say it. Still hates how saying it makes it truer every time. “Um, yeah. That’s. I like that idea. Maybe I’ll try it. Got any suggestions?”</p><p>“I don’t know. What was your old man like?”</p><p>“He was. Quiet. Sometimes. And funny.”</p><p>“Nothing like you, then.”</p><p>“Ha. You’re a riot. But no, I guess not. In some ways, maybe, we were alike. Or anyway, I wanted to be like him, which isn’t the same thing. He wore jeans and button-up shirts. He had. Like. These eyes that could just figure everything out without you having to say anything, but he’d always listen anyway. I don’t know, man. It’s starting to really fade for me. It’s scary how that happens.”</p><p>Johnny looks at him for a long time. His eyes are so blue. He doesn’t ask a single question, like he knows they would all be pointless. Daniel would never have guessed that he’d be a good listener, too. “How about I just put something on, and you can say no way, next! Or okay, I’ll put up with it for now. Okay?”</p><p>“Yeah, okay. That sounds good.”</p><p>Johnny leaps to his feet without pushing up with his hand in a kind of half kick-up, and it sends a thrill-pulse through Daniel to see the display of natural grace. He isn’t even showing off, is the thing. It’s just the way he moves, still. Like maybe he’s trying to forget about karate or maybe he already has—but karate will never forget about him.</p><p>He puts a record on, and surprises Daniel yet again with a singer whose voice is so gentle and haunting that it makes the hairs on the back of Daniel’s neck do the wave. He doesn’t have to ask if the singer is dead. He just knows. He doesn’t understand what’s going on with the cadence of his voice or the intricate fingerpicking and rhythm of his playing, but he knows it’s unique. That he once lived, made this strange music, and died, but will always be with the living for as long as boys like Johnny lay around in their bedrooms, listening. And Daniel, for now, for this infinite afternoon, gets to be a boy like that, too. Because Johnny said Listen with me, and Daniel said Okay, sure.</p><p>“I think my dad would’ve listened to this,” Daniel says, finally. Long after the record is over and the static sounds like the house is breathing along with them.</p><p>“I bet he did,” Johnny says. And they look at each other for a long time without saying another word. Who is this guy? Daniel wonders. Who on earth is Johnny Lawrence? And why is it the only question on earth that matters to him? Johnny’s eyes are blue in his blue bedroom and time stands still. Time means nothing at all when the dead can still sing and the living can still hear them whenever the needle touches down. There is so little space between them. Between Daniel and Johnny. Between Johnny and Daniel and the dead. They’re alive, Daniel thinks. They are still alive and had better figure out what to do about it.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Fun Fact: Johnny really was born on a full moon! I looked it up AFTER I wrote that part! Eerie, right? :^]</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Chapter 5</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>In which Laura, Daniel, and Johnny all have their own thoughts.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>A meandering little chapter but I hope you all like it. </p><p>TW: There is a subtle reference to the AIDS/HIV epidemic [and some secondary characters who have had it] that I only touch on in this chapter but will address in greater depth later on, complete with more stringent tagging and warning. If this is something difficult for you to handle, please take all the care of yourself that you need and deserve, dear ones.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Daniel stays for dinner. Laura insists, and Johnny doesn’t protest, so he takes it as a second invitation. Daniel doesn’t want to make a nuisance of himself on his first visit, but Johnny’s the one who sets the table for three, putting the third hand-thrown plate down with finality, like a challenge, his eyes fastened on Daniel’s. That fond smirk toying with his lips. What can Daniel do? He rolls his eyes and sits down. They fit around the little Formica dinette set as if it was made with them in mind. Johnny rolls his eyes when Laura dishes up the spicy lentil shepherd’s pie with a crispy golden mashed potato top, but he tears into it with gusto, only griping slightly about not remembering agreeing to become a vegetarian. “I must’ve been low on iron, or something,” he adds.</p><p>Laura doesn’t take a word of it seriously, and Johnny winks at her over a mouthful. It’s so endearing how much Johnny is like an irritable puppy around his mother, goading her into swatting him lovingly, as if he only gets up to his antics so she’ll put him gently in his place where he actually wants to be. Like he needs her to remind him that he’ll always be her pup. She does get up and get him a bottle of ketchup, though, and Johnny glows with the joy of someone who’s about to get his fix. He makes a Jackson Pollock out of his dinner, and all is right with the world.</p><p>Daniel watches them over his own dinnerplate, forgetting to eat because all he wants to do is bask in their warmth. It’s hard to admit it, but Daniel has been lonely for years. He can’t seem to make his connections last longer than a semester, or a summer. Other than Mr. Miyagi, he’s never really made a friend. He’s fought someone to the death before, sure, but now he doesn’t even have a nemesis to call his own. It’s kind of pathetic, but he misses the chemistry of a blood-deep rivalry. It’s the most passion he’s ever felt with another person. When he’s not fighting for his life, Daniel’s heart is just too damned soft. Too hungry. But here at this table, he finally feels like chemistry doesn’t have to be violent. At least, not in the old way. Though the thought of getting Johnny on the mat again doesn’t feel like the wrong kind of violence. If he wants blood between them again, it’s nothing he’ll ever let show or need to explain. He wouldn’t have to explain it to Johnny. That much he knows. And it’s comforting.</p><p>They settle their stomachs in the living room before dessert. Johnny collapses onto the rug in front of a vibrant orange metal hanging fireplace that probably doesn’t get any action except around Christmas, much like the corner fireplace at the little jade green house, but it still adds a cosiness to the space that Daniel loves. He finally untucks his shirt, undoing the top button of his collar as he flops into a round wicker chair with a lushly patterned cushion, and wills himself not to fall asleep. Laura keeps them charmed and entertained with anecdotes about the Venice Beach Farmer’s Market and various characters she meets on her rambles through the neighbourhood. He watches Johnny watch her, and his heart is so full. If only he had known this side of Johnny when they were younger. But maybe they’re still young enough for it to matter now. Maybe it can even matter more. He wants to know all of Johnny, not even excluding the bad shit that went down between them. Daniel wants it all. He’s greedy for every single morsel of experience. He doesn’t want to lose a thing they’ve had together.</p><p>Between lazing around on the fluffy rug like an escaped but seemingly benevolent panther and attacking a giant wedge of cherry pie a la mode like it’s the only thing standing between him and victory, Johnny keeps getting up and disappearing back into his bedroom at intervals. Daniel worries that it’s because Johnny really wants him to go home already. But every time he ambles back into the living room, Johnny’s eyes search for him and when they find him, his shoulders relax. Daniel can’t figure it out, but he likes it. And he keeps sticking around just a little bit longer. Something in Johnny’s eyes says <em>Don’t go yet, LaRusso. </em>Daniel can’t argue and doesn’t want to.</p><p>When he finally <em>does</em> go home because he knows Mr. Miyagi will be wondering where he is, Johnny shoves his huge feet into his bright sneakers and walks Daniel down the winding canalway to his car. They don’t talk much. The moon is full and pink like on the night Johnny was born, or so Daniel likes to imagine now that he knows a few things more about him. They stand staring up into its light until there is nothing more Daniel can do to delay getting into the DeLuxe and driving off into the hazy night. Johnny presses something cool and rectangular into his hand before he turns back the way they came, one arm lifted in a wave that isn’t one. Moonlight licks his broad shoulders where he’s pushed up his t-shirt sleeves and makes them shine. He doesn’t look back. Daniel slides into the cool leather seat of his car and holds what Johnny has given him. It rattles slightly. It’s been a while since Daniel held a cassette case in his hand, but there is no mistaking it.</p><p>He doesn’t need to read the hasty scrawl to know that it’s the record they’d listened to. Johnny must’ve been sneaking back and forth to his room to flip the record and the tape. Fill out the labels and stick them. Transcribe the tracklisting in perfect order onto the Memorex liner sleeve. No one has ever made Daniel a tape before. He never thought anyone would. But here he is, twenty-seven years old, holding his first homemade tape. He feels like a teenager again. He might even feel like one properly for the first time. He flushes. And he knows that yet again, because of Johnny goddamned Lawrence, he is dead meat. What was it Mr. Miyagi said about revenge and digging two graves? Well, whatever it was, Daniel has a feeling that this time he only needs to dig one. He might as well crawl into it right now and make himself at home because he is in deep. Maybe he always was. Revenge is one thing. It takes two. This is something else entirely, and Daniel will do it alone if he has to. He doesn’t let himself hope that it can be any other way.</p><p> </p><p>Johnny chose that record because it feels like Daniel. Soft, dark. Dangerous. Unknowable, no matter how many times you flip the record over. He used to flip Daniel just as easy. Trip him. Kick and shove and punch him. And Daniel never broke. Not once. Pink moons only exist in the darkest skies. Deepest nights. The feeling Johnny gets listening to that record has always been the feeling he gets when he thinks about Daniel. Something untouchable and beautiful rising so far above him it makes him feel both small and seen.</p><p>He lays alone in the dark long after LaRusso has gone home. His hands tingle with the released tension of everything that happened today. He acted so cool. He was so nonchalant. But inside he was trembling the whole time. Slightly sick to his stomach like before a match when he was still young and green and uncertain. So small anything could pick him up. Mess him up. Toss him aside to die like some soft roadkill. He thought LaRusso was like that, too, when they met. If you want to call that a meeting. And maybe it made Johnny want to get it over with. The murder blow. Those big dumb eyes. But he’d been all wrong about LaRusso. Or anyway, all wrong about himself. He was the soft thing after all, and Daniel was tough as steel. He couldn’t kill him if he tried. Now what, though? He doesn’t want to kill him anymore but what he <em>does </em>want to do, he can’t quite make out, let alone face. He feels an ache he used to understand real easy. But now it seems so complicated. Like dreaming an old familiar dream in a new language you don’t understand when you wake up.</p><p>He can’t sleep so he puts a record on. He puts the same record on, over and over. Lift the needle to stop the static. Turn the delicate disc over by feel in the dark with only the nightlight moon to help you out. Johnny’s big hands are dexterous. Precise. Lift the needle. Flip the record. Touch the needle down. Again and again, barefoot and bare chested in the dark. Daniel’s record now. Johnny’s record about Daniel. The hiss at the end puts him to sleep eventually and it’s no way to treat a record but it’s what he does. It’s what he needs to do to get through the endless night after Daniel came to find him where he lives. Invited, but still. Still. He feels so pried open and seen and it makes him sick and it makes him feel better and he doesn’t know what he wants but he wants it all.</p><p><em>When I was young, younger than before. I never saw the truth hanging from the door. And now I’m older, see it face to face. And now I’m older, gotta get up, clean the place… </em>Maybe it’s Johnny’s record about himself, too. Why they are the same one is a mystery to him. He doesn’t want to solve it. He just wants to live it. Find out that he’s not living it alone after all. Maybe he never was.</p><p> </p><p>Johnny pretends it’s all Laura’s idea, and she lets him. And it isn’t like she doesn’t “love all that nature shit”, as her son put it so charmingly out of her hearing. She does. But she loves her boy even more. So she lets him pretend she’s the one dragging him up to Reseda even though he “hates it there, Mom, Jeez!” in order to see what kind of tiny trees might love the light of the Venice canals as much as they do. Her strapping son folds himself into her little pink car unaware that he is flushed a similar shade of anticipation. He waits for her to buckle herself in safely before pulling out into the narrow back alley of their only way out of the neighbourhood where Johnny was born to her. She’d been seventeen. Naïve. Still so stupid-in-love with a man who would never look back. But she loved Johnny more than herself or that man. More than anyone or anything on this earth. Everything she’s ever done was only to serve that basic and most infinite fact of her life. Even the things she can’t forgive herself for. Maybe those things especially. But Johnny, who is a good boy, the best of sons for all of his anger and forceful energy, has never held it against her let alone over her head.</p><p>Daniel LaRusso is the only other person she has ever seen look at her son like she does. Like he can see who Johnny is, even if he isn’t sure what he’s looking at yet. He wants to know. She can see that plain as day. And she will build every bridge she needs to with her bare hands to make sure he keeps on coming around. Just in case Johnny second guesses the ones he’s working on.</p><p>Laura slides her purple-tinted sunglasses down over her eyes. She reaches for the radio and turns it up. A familiar voice floats up around them. <em>Would you stay if she promised you heaven? Will you ever win? She is like a cat in the dark. And then she is the darkness… </em>Laura looks at her son. Watches the pink creep further up his neck. He could hide everything if it wasn’t for that sunset effect. His emotion shows like a flower bursting open no matter how he schools his face. He’s learned he can’t punch his way out of that. Not every time. But she hasn’t seen him flushed like this in a long time. And it isn’t anger anymore that blooms over him. His eyes are blue as the Pacific and maybe slightly scared but they’re also eager. Like they were when he was a child and she danced with him to this song in their tiny living room with her brother Jack and his lover Raymundo. Laura doesn’t know if Johnny remembers. But she prays that he does. She prays to Rhiannon, maybe. To Stevie Nicks herself, who has always been something of a goddess in their private household of two.</p><p>Laura sings along for a line or two and Johnny huffs out something that isn’t quite a laugh, but it’s a fond sound. He doesn’t join in, but his shoulders relax as he nods his head as much as he can to keep time with the dreamscape. “Remember how much we played this record when you were little?”</p><p>Johnny rolls his eyes but the corner of his mouth lifts. “I wasn’t that little. I was ten when this came out.” He doesn’t say what they both know: that they didn’t have much more time before he’d had to grow up faster than his body could keep up with for a few more years. Laura had met Sid when he was ten. A big shot with a blown tire waiting out the tow truck in the diner where she’d been midway through a double shift. And that was that. Not a meet-cute. A meet-disaster concealed in Tiffany blue and Amex platinum.</p><p>“Little enough to dance with your momma without dying of embarrassment,” Laura says, laughing. Then her smile stills like a watched bird. “Jack wasn’t sick yet. Raymundo was, but we thought it was just a bad flu or something.”</p><p>“Mom.”</p><p>“I know. You don’t like to talk about it.”</p><p>Johnny downshifts with a little more force than is good for the old gearshift, but Laura doesn’t say anything. “Can you blame me? Jesus.”</p><p>“No, Baby,” she says. She takes his big wrist in her small hand and squeezes, finding his pulse and pressing it. It races like quicksilver in her grip. “I don’t blame you for a thing.”</p><p>They listen to the end of the song in silence and don’t say a word all the way to Reseda. <em>Dreams unwind. Love’s a state of mind. Dreams unwind… </em>When Stevie is singing, what more is there really to say? You either sing along or you don’t. Either way, it’s a prayer. Johnny’d never admit to it, but Laura swears she can hear her son hum. She can feel it in her fingertips. He doesn’t like to sing out loud but she knows Johnny remembers every single word.  <em>Will you ever win? </em>She thinks he will. Of all people, he’s got to. She did not bring him into this world to lay down in it quietly.</p><p> </p><p>The truth is that Daniel had thought of little else but Johnny when he was sixteen, for all that Ali was the coolest most beautiful girl he’d ever seen. The flex and ripple of Johnny’s musculature under his t-shirts. The tensile shape of his wrist rising from his cuff the few times he’d ever raised his hand in class, usually to give some smart-ass reply different from the kind Daniel always had on the tip of his tongue. It’s like they were two opposing kinds of obnoxious that just couldn’t coexist at the time—they cancelled each other out or something. But now they weren’t like that. Daniel hoped they would never be like that again. All he can think about now is Johnny’s bedroom. Johnny’s eyes. Johnny’s shoulders. His bare feet and calf muscles. The sweet way he looked at his mother with zero embarrassment. Call Daniel old-fashioned, but that’s the final coffin nail. A boy who loves his mother like that is a boy you can take home to your own.</p><p>Daniel spends his morning tending a sickly little bonsai Mr. Miyagi entrusted to his care. <em>Bring back life, Daniel-San. It give life back. </em>He thinks about the delicate seashell and sand dollar backsplash in the sunny little kitchen as he trims shriveled leaves and prunes a withered branch. He thinks about the sinuous arch of Johnny’s powerful foot as he walked across the sun-splashed honeycomb floor as he wraps a shimmering strand of wire around a hesitant trunk. As he gently dampens the soil, he thinks about a purple mug and ketchup spatters and blue blue blue eyes and tense pinkening lips that are begging to soften for him. At least in his dreams, they are. And these are wild thoughts. And these are dangerous thoughts. And they hurt him. And they warm him. And he is a goner. He has always been a total goddamned goner. Even the baby tree, so delicate beneath his fingertips, knows he is a dead boy. He feels the way life still surges in the tentatively stretching twigs, the shy green blush yearning to deepen and darken into glorious <em>life</em> and he understands that yet again the baby tree his sensei has given into his care is a metaphor for his own goddamned life and he is starting from the beginning again. No one ever tells you how many beginnings there are. No one ever tells you how many times you’ve got to start again. Once more with feeling, right? Once more. And then again. And again. And <em>again </em>until there are no more <em>once mores</em> left. You’re all paid up and it’s time to clock out and you wish you were a baby tree under somebody else’s care.</p><p>He spends the whole morning contemplating his own existence in the fragile but stubborn structure of a stalwart needy little plant and then he looks up and all he sees is blue eyes blond hair golden skin for miles and miles and miles. The gentle jangle of the windchime the door catches just enough to sing to them does not prepare him for Johnny Laurence filling the doorway. But then. What ever has?</p><p>“Hey, LaRusso,” he says. “My mom needs a baby tree.”</p><p>Daniel smiles like the idiot he is and stands. “You’ve come to the right place.”  And oh, how many ways can a guy mean one simple phrase?</p><p>Johnny lifts his head, his neck lengthening to reveal his whole astonishing height. “Alright,” he says. “Cool.” And Laura ducks in under his arm, bringing the rest of the light with her until it is all here and all theirs and nobody else can have any because Daniel is keeping it all.</p>
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